By design, the overall cost to a university of implementing the compact, in the short term, would be quite small. Hybrid open-access fees are explicitly eschewed, and true open-access fees tend to be found at present in just those areas of scholarship where grant support is most prevalent, reducing the underwriting load on the university substantially. Rough estimates based on the experience of the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative fall in the range of tens of dollars per faculty member per year.

But I can understand that some universities might have wanted to wait until there is some empirical evidence of this claim. That evidence is now available. Barbara DeFelice, Director of the Digital Resources Program at Dartmouth Library has compiled some statistics from the COPE signatory institutions about their OA fund expenditures, which she discussed at a recent ARL talk. I used her statistics to calculate approximate costs per faculty member per year. The numbers reveal that the outlays are even more manageable than even I had estimated, perhaps by an order of magnitude. (I’ve made these numbers quite conservative by counting faculty conservatively and estimating that each article funded cost $1,500 dollars. The actual average seems to be somewhat less. As more data is collected, I’ll try to make it available.)

Institution

Months

# Funded

Funded/year

Faculty size

$/faculty/year

Berkeley

31

92

35.61

1582

$33.77

Columbia

7

2

3.43

1377

$3.73

Cornell

11

3

3.27

1594

$3.08

Dartmouth

11

1

1.09

450

$3.64

Harvard

11

1

1.09

1633

$1.00

MSKCC

5

0

0.00

560

$0.00

MIT

2

0

0.00

1025

$0.00

Ottawa

8

25

37.50

1257

$44.75

For universities that run their OA funds in accordance with COPE recommendations (that is, no hybrid fees, no grant-funded articles), the costs come to not tens of dollars per faculty member per year, but single digit dollars. The outliers are Berkeley and Ottawa, both of which will cover hybrid fees (though Berkeley places tighter caps on fee per article) and will cover grant-funded articles (though they ask for grant funds to be used first).

The bottom line is that the direct costs of running a COPE-compliant open-access fund are trivial, and the administrative costs of dealing with handfuls of requests are trivial as well. Cost should not be an impediment to setting up an open-access fund in this way. In particular, harangues about open-access funds amounting to throwing away large quantities of valuable dollars can please stop now. For instance, Stevan Harnad likes to say things like “COPE is based on the illusion that there is enough money available in institutions today to pay for OA publication in all the must-have journals — Nature, Science, the American Physical Society journals, and all the other top journals — while continuing to subscribe to those journals (and we don’t as yet have OA for their contents, so it’s premature to cancel).” He either misunderstands the compact or willfully misrepresents it, since COPE-compliant funds need not, should not, and generally do not pay publication fees for the subscription journals he lists. COPE does not support “double-dipping”.

The reason that the costs of COPE-compliant open-access funds are so low is because demand for the funds is low because, in turn, there are very few quality OA journals charging publication fees, because, finally, to do so would be to put the journals at a systematic disadvantage in getting authors as compared to subscription journals that don’t charge fees. (This disadvantage is exactly what COPE is trying to remedy.) Here is how the numbers break down. Of the 5,000 or so open-access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, only a hundred or two are of the character that these universities’ researchers are likely to publish in them. For example, only a hundred or so are indexed by Thomson ISI for impact factors. Of these, the majority don’t charge publication fees, so can’t contribute to OA fund demand. Those that do charge a fee are overwhelmingly in the life sciences where grant funding is widespread, hence they also don’t generate demand on the OA fund.

If there is so little demand for an OA fund, why have it at all? The goal of a COPE-compliant OA fund is not short term maximization of access to an institution’s output. (If it were, then hybrid fees would be appropriate to underwrite. But that goal can be accomplished much more cost-effectively by establishing good green open-access policies.) Rather, the goal of COPE is to provide the basis for an alternative business model, should a large number of institutions similarly commit. If a large number of institutions were to commit to the compact, publishers would have a viable business model through charging publication fees in a way that they do not now have.

In essence, COPE is trying to establish a kind of safety net. Safety nets are useful even when they are not used. Safety nets allow people to take risks that we want to promote. A publisher changing its business model is incurring such a risk. We, the universities and research funders, may need collectively to build a very big safety net (university by university, funder by funder) to convince a publisher to take that risk. But given that the cost of each of our pieces of the safety net is so incredibly low, it is worth keeping our pieces up and encouraging others to add their pieces, in the hope that a big enough net will encourage the publishers to take the risk to walk the tightrope from the subscription model to the publication fee model. If we are successful, demand for the OA funds will grow as publishers will flip business model to an OA publication fee basis, thereby freeing up funds to pay those fees. If we are not successful, at least the costs are negligible.

(Thanks to Barbara DeFelice for collecting the data and making it available.)

4 Responses to “How much does a COPE-compliant open-access fund cost?”

For what it’s worth, my objections to COPE are not based on double-dipping; they are not even based on COPE per se. They are based on committing to COPE without first committing to mandating Green OA.

It is good that COPE does not propose to fund hybrid Gold (where the journal continues to get paid for subscriptions, and also gets paid for those articles that pay extra to be made OA). That’s double-dipping — though the publishers can (and some do) reply:

“No, it’s not double-dipping, it’s just a safety net, in case the market ever swings toward Gold: For now, we will reduce our subscriptions to reflect any Gold OA revenues. If and when the transition is complete, it’s complete,:all revenues come from Gold OA fees, zero from subscriptions. Never any double-dipping.”

A safety net to preserve current revenue streams, regardless of their source.

No, the ones who are double-dripping (sic) are the institutions, who are spending money on buying in subscriptions, and, whether they pay for hybrid Gold or pure-gold COPE journals (e.g., in the Springer/BMC “Membership Deal”), also spending money on Gold (scarce money, reputedly, given the years of agonizing over the serials crisis and journal price inflation).

But even that would not matter, if the institutions were just to mandate Green OA first.

But committing to paying for Gold OA of any description without first mandating Green OA strikes me as a real head-shaker. What we need is OA, not safety nets for publishers, Green OA mandates will bring us OA, 100% OA. Fiddling pre-emptively with the future of publishing will not.

Stuart has made such a brilliant, unique contribution to OA in orchestrating Harvard’s historic Green OA mandate. I continue to feel perplexed as to to why he is squandering any of his considerable expertise and influence at this critical juncture on persuading universities to squander their scarce resources (no matter how minimally) on pre-emptive Gold (as a publishers’ safety net) without first persuading them to follow his own gloriously Green example first.

P.S. Upon reflection, I remembered that Stuart has actually given a hint of why he has become so preoccupied with Gold: Because one of the obstacles he had encountered in convincing faculty to vote-in a Green OA mandate by consensus, as Harvard FAS did, was (some) authors’ worries about publishers’ future.

So maybe the preoccupation with creating a safety net for publishers is really for the (sense of) safety of authors, so they are more likely to vote-in a Green OA mandate by consensus?

But the Harvard FAS’s historic consensus on Green OA came before any commitment to a Gold safety net. And the same is true of the over 150 other Green OA mandates worldwide to date (though most were adopted by presidential or provostial wisdom, rather than waiting for faculty to come to any consensus).

Wouldn’t a less costly and circuitous way of calming individuals’ concerns about the safety of publishers under Green OA mandates be to point out that if subscription publishing were ever caused to become unsustainable because of the availability of Green OA, the vast sums of money that institutions are now spending on subscriptions would then by the very same token be released as the “safety net” to pay for the conversion to Gold OA?

Does the first step really have to be pre-emptive payment, even token payment, rather than just going ahead and mandating the Green and letting the future of publishing take care of itself, while the research community takes care of getting its research into the hands of all its intended users at long last, instead of just those whose institutions can afford a subscription?

So Prof. Harnad’s objections to COPE are not based on COPE. I’m glad we got that cleared up. Then perhaps he’ll stop saying things like “COPE is based on an illusion” when it’s not.

As to whether I have “become so preoccupied with Gold [OA]”: Scholarly publishing is a multifaceted problem. There are many actors and interests. Some of us confronted with a system of this complexity are able to entertain more than one idea at a time about the situation. Some of us on the other hand are stuck on one idea. They think that effort expended on any other ideas is a sign of “preoccupation”, of “fever“. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that the preoccupation or fever is in the mind of the person unwilling to entertain more than one idea at a time even when those ideas are not inconsistent with each other, are, in fact, synergistic. Just saying.